Rude Awakening: Germany at War, Again

The war in Ukraine has forced Germany to think seriously about its position in the world and its national interests, leaving behind the evasive pragmatism of the Merkel era. The Russian invasion of Ukraine compelled Germany on short notice to cut its trade relations with Russia and provide military support to Ukraine, following American and NATO policy. After a period of indecision, the German government, prodded by the United States, chose to seek a leading role in the western European war effort, and in western Europe generally. Its hope is that this will enable it to influence American and NATO strategic decisions, in particu­lar to prevent any direct involvement of NATO in the war.

As an aspiring leader of the European Union, Germany is faced with a deep split between the new member states bordering Russia and the western European states, including Germany itself, that hope for a negotiated settlement with Russia rather than a military victory. There are also profound differences within western Europe with respect to the future role of the EU and its relationship both to its member states and to NATO. A severe additional challenge in the future will be how Germany, and the EU under its leadership, will position themselves in the building conflict between the United States and China, both major trading partners of German industry. A related question will be how to respond to American efforts to involve NATO in a potential war with China in the North Pacific.

Pragmatism and Its Discontents

Angela Merkel retired less than two years ago, in December 2021, after sixteen years as German chancellor. By the end of her tenure, she was also, effectively, the unofficial president of the European Union. Yet hardly anything is now remembered, let alone repeated, of the tributes paid to her at the time, celebrating her as one of the great political figures of the still-young twenty-first century. Her party, the Christian-Democratic Union (CDU), whose undisputed leader she had been for so long, no longer invites her to meetings, preferring not to talk about her, for fear of causing divisions in its ranks. When her successor as chancellor, her longtime finance minister and deputy, Olaf Scholz, a Social Democrat, let it be known that he sometimes speaks to her on the phone to seek her advice, this was considered bizarre by the mainstream media. The Merkel era, there can be no doubt, has ended. Its legacy, at least for the time being, has disappeared from the record¹—a long error is being erased from memory, and here as everywhere else after the Zeitenwende² (the term Scholz used for the turning point marked by the Ukraine invasion), things are no longer as they once were.

What has Merkel done, or not done, to deserve such a fate? And what more may come when the memory of the panegyric proclamations delivered by her party and her coalition partners, not to mention her legions of devoted mainstream journalists, has faded further? According to the know-it-alls of today, many of them until recently passionate Merkelians, Merkel failed to face the challenges of a Manichaean world in which a good empire must forever eliminate new evil empires if it does not want to be eliminated itself; in which it is necessary to take a stand and show it; to close the Western ranks under the leadership of the United States of America; and to establish not only peace but also justice, if necessary with arms.

It will be interesting to watch how Merkel will defend herself against the now dominant anti-Merkel narrative.³ To be sure, she has always kept aloof of public controversies—considered them unnecessary, in any case too politically risky. This was possible in a society that, unlike France or the United States, is not given to strategic discussions of its political destiny, at least not to controversial ones. The ultimate reason for this may be that the necessary anchor point of any such discussion—a concept of a national interest, and the best way to pursue it—was and still is absent in Germany. “Ideology” is considered obsolete, too; what counts is “pragmatism,” and under Merkel what pragmatism required from case to case was best left to the great pragmatist in office.⁴ Looking at Merkel’s political legacy, one feels reminded of Max Weber’s 1918 critique of Bismarck, the founder of the German state whom he other­wise admired. Bismarck, according to Weber, had left behind “a nation without any political will of its own, accustomed to the idea that the great statesman at the helm would make the necessary political decisions . . . a nation accustomed to fatalistic sufferance of all decisions” made on its behalf. Furthermore, wrote Weber, with remarkable parallels to today:

The great statesman did not leave behind any political tradition. He neither attracted nor even suffered independent political minds, not to speak of strong political personalities. . . . A com­pletely powerless parliament was the purely negative result of his enormous prestige. . . . This powerlessness of parliament also meant that its intellectual level was greatly depressed. . . . The level of parliament depends on whether it does not merely discuss great issues but decisively influences them; in other words, its quality depends on whether what happens there matters, or whether parliament is nothing but the unwillingly tolerated rubber stamp of a ruling bureaucracy [emphasis in the original].⁵

Discounted Futures: Three Vignettes

How Germany got into the condition from which it has now been so rudely awakened can be illustrated by looking at three issues: energy, Europe, and national security. With regard to energy, the determination with which Merkel, as chancellor of a coalition with the liberal FDP (2009–13), pursued her first Energiewende (“energy turnaround”) is all but forgotten today: a turn away from the nuclear phase-out in 2000 under Schröder and the Greens and back to nuclear power—which Merkel, invoking her authority as a physicist, declared safe. Then, in March 2011, when a tsunami swamped one of the nuclear reactors at Japan’s Fukushima power plant—at a time when it had become likely that the pleasantly small FDP would not survive the coalition and Merkel might in the next legislative period have to rely again on the uncomfortably large SPD—she ordered the shutdown of all German nuclear reactors within a few days, resulting in essentially the same nuclear phase-out as pushed through by the Schröder government.

Merkel’s second nuclear energy turn opened the door for a first political turn to the Greens, who by then promised to become large enough—but not too large—for a neo-bourgeois centrist coalition led by the CDU. This would exclude the SPD, which Merkel’s party traditionally consid­ered unreliable in both domestic and foreign policy. A short time later, Merkel agreed to phase out coal as well, again accommodating the Greens, without, however, being able to provide for a compensating expansion of renewable energy. Thus was born Germa­ny’s dependence, and by extension the dependence of parts of western Europe, universally lamented post–February 2022, on Russian oil and natural gas—which the Christian Democrats and the Greens to this day somehow manage to blame on sentimental Russophilia on the part of the SPD. In the years following her second Energiewende, whenever Merkel’s foreign policy conflicted with Ukraine’s, especially with re­spect to the construction of Nord Stream 2, her overriding concern became the security of German gas supplies. As long as the pipelines went through Ukraine, they were always at risk of being interrupted by disputes over both the price of gas supplied by Russia to Ukraine and Ukrainian demands for higher transit fees for the Russian gas to western Europe, as happened, for example in 2006.⁶ With Nord Stream 2, expected to begin operation in the near future, there seemed to be no need for a precise assessment of when German renewable electricity production would meet the anticipated increase in electricity demand—even if the transition to battery-powered automobiles progressed as quickly as the German government was planning.

Second, regarding Europe and the EU, since the turn of the century German policy had been firmly focused on European Monetary Union (EMU), ideologically held up as an example of equal economic benefit for all, but in fact a bonanza for Germany and a losing proposition for the Mediterranean countries in particular.⁷ In the 1980s, Italy and France had found themselves under pressure to follow Germany’s anti-inflationary monetary policy, as the deutschmark, in an increasingly internationalized financial system, had de facto become the common currency of Europe. Since this severely constrained the growth of their national economies, they hoped to replace the European national cur­rencies with a single currency for Europe as a whole, one that would be more political and softer. This failed because, in the European treaties of the 1990s, Germany managed to push through a German-style common currency, the euro (“der Euro, hart wie die Mark”).

Subsequently, Germany sought to defend by all means the monetary union and the euro in their original form, regardless of the damage they were causing in the southern member states. Rather than allowing the relevant treaties to be reopened for EMU to be renegotiated, German European policy centered on short-term concessions to the political elites of the Mediterranean countries, designed to enable them to con­vince their voters to stay in the monetary union, regardless of its adverse institutional conditions.⁸ For Germany, as Europe’s economic hegemon, it was important that its concessions to its southern partners were inconspicuous enough for German voters not to notice them, while at the same time allowing the pro-European governments of member states on the southern periphery to present them to their publics as lasting improvements achieved through political pressure on rich Germany.

This could not have gone on forever, and one can assume that on the inside everyone was aware of this. Given the de facto impossibility of a fundamental reform of EMU, European governments had already before the war relied on jointly cultivated hopes that the deluge would be long enough in coming that dealing with it would be left to their successors. The so-called Corona Recovery Fund, launched extra legem under the label Next Generation EU (NGEU), and celebrated as a final act of salvation for “Europe,”⁹ soon proved to be no more than another emergency bandage. Merkel’s last trump card before her departure was the installation of the monetary technician Mario Draghi as Italian prime minister and German-European viceroy. Draghi was supposed to keep Italy quiet for a few more years with the help of creatively bor­rowed pan-European debt, but his administration lasted only briefly. A little over a year after taking power, Draghi threw in, leaving the farm to an outsider seen by the right-thinking as “post-fascist.” The increasingly real possibility that what was needed to save monetary union would be too much for Germany, while what Germany could afford would be too little for Italy, was never considered in Angela Merkel’s Germany and its “pro-European” political “discourse.”

National security is a third key issue, and offers a preview of what is in store for Germany following the Ukraine war. During her time as chancellor, Merkel managed to almost completely avoid discussions on this topic. This was in keeping with the fact that postwar Germany’s armed forces have always been firmly in the hands of NATO, and thus of the United States, beginning with the “westernization” of the Federal Republic under its first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer (1949–63). One expression of the country’s lack of sovereignty in national security matters is that to this day it does not have anything like a general staff or, for that matter, a national security council; planning for its military, which is fully integrated into the NATO command structure, is outsourced to NATO headquarters in Brussels. Moreover, Merkel had inherited from Kohl and Schröder a state on whose soil the United States maintains one of its largest foreign bases.¹⁰ Germany does not have nuclear weapons of its own, although it is geostrategically sand­wiched between four nuclear powers—Russia, France, Britain, and the United States, the latter main­taining an unknown number of nuclear warheads on its German base. For decades, Germany had to be careful not to anger the United States on the one hand or France on the other by aligning itself too closely with one of the two, or giving that impression. Also part of Merkel’s inheritance was German participation in the bombing of Serbia (for seventy-eight days in 1999), the global expansion of NATO’s area of operations (formally agreed in 1999), the war in Afghanistan (begun in 2001), and the American invasion of Iraq (2003). During this period, the construction of the American New World Order at the “end of history” merged with a historically un­precedented rearmament in the context of America’s War on Terror,¹¹ accompanied by urgent requests that its European allies, especially Germany, increase their military spending to 2 percent of their respective national product by 2024.¹²

As chancellor, Merkel never opposed the 2 percent target; not within NATO councils, as far as one knows, and certainly not in public. Nor, at the same time, did she do anything to achieve this target, perhaps hoping that later American administrations would somehow forget about it.¹³ France also pushed for higher German arms spending, probably because the French nuclear force is so expensive to maintain and modernize that the French military’s conventional capabilities suffer from atrophy. Particularly for the “European strategic sovereignty” France is seeking for itself, not least in Africa, it would prefer to have its nuclear force supplemented by conventional German forces. Merkel managed to put off both the United States and France until some undefined time in the future, avoid­ing a decision between NATO on the one hand and Europe—more precisely, a European army first within NATO, then perhaps increasingly outside of it—on the other. Promising France expensive joint armament projects in the future, Merkel gladly continued to buy weapons off the shelf from the United States. Together with Sarkozy, she blocked the admission of Ukraine to NATO in 2008, for which the United States had pushed. Then, starting in the mid-2010s, while still missing the 2 percent target, she sent German troops, at French request, on what soon turned out to be hopeless missions in various Sahel states. In part, this may have been compensation for the fact that Merkel had not been able or willing in 2011 to persuade her coalition partner at the time, the FDP, with its foreign minister, the late Guido Westerwelle, to participate in the military intervention in Libya, initiated by the French New Philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy and later joined by the British and the Americans. The adventure ended with the assassination of Presi­dent Gaddafi, a onetime personal friend of Sarkozy’s, resulting in the country’s collapse into a state of anarchy that continues to this day.

New Germany, Old Germany

Whether the Ukraine war really marked a Zeitenwende, as Scholz claimed on February 27, 2022, three days after it began, is to be qualified. More realistically, perhaps, it was the culmination of longer-running developments which Germany, caught in Merkel’s geopolitical narcosis, had failed to appreciate. What happened was less a historic rupture in the world than a rude awakening in Germany, when the self-delusions and denied contradictions of German foreign policy cultivated by Merkel and her political family were brought to an abrupt end by a newly determined United States, a declining world power seeking to defend its status by military means. The war offered a welcome oppor­tunity for the United States to reinforce its control over Germany; it put an end to the various subversive efforts by German governments to gain more independence for German foreign policy; it resolved the indecisiveness of German foreign relations between Franco-European and transatlantic demands in favor of the latter; deprived Germany of what­ever possibility there may have been of playing France and the United States against each other in pursuit of German autonomy; transformed the European Union into an economic policy auxiliary of NATO; strengthened the influence in Europe of Poland and the Baltics, at the expense of Germany and France; obliged Germany to participate in Western economic warfare, first against Russia and increasingly also against China—an economic war that is to some extent also a war against Germany itself; and made Germany’s fate as an industrialized country more than ever dependent on the course and outcome of the escalating conflict between the United States and China, driven by an American interest in cutting China down to size before it is too late, in order to maintain an American-dominated global order.

In the following, I will offer a few selected points on what the Ukraine war is likely to mean for Germany as a country:

(1) Semi-sovereignty restored.¹⁴ Seen from Germany, the war in Ukraine is part of a long history of mostly covert trials of strength with the United States over the extent to which the German state should be entitled to something like national sovereignty, after its unconditional surrender in 1945. This includes the German signature of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (1969, immediately after Willy Brandt took office; ratified in 1975 under Helmut Schmidt) and, associated with it, the American assurance that it would defend Germany with nuclear weapons if necessary, despite doubts on the German side that were never entirely overcome; American suspicion of Willy Brandt’s Ostpoli­tik and possible West German ambitions for greater national independence that might have been associated with it; the American mobilization against “Genscherism,”¹⁵ believed to be playing the United States and the Soviet Union against each other, in the years before the collapse of the Eastern Bloc; the Federal Republic’s agreement, in return for unification in 1990, to the permanent stationing of American troops on German territory, notwithstanding the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War; the American demand that a reunited Germany participate in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, especially the bombing of Belgrade (Operation Allied Force in May 1999) and the separation of Kosovo from Serbia; the expansion of NATO’s jurisdiction in 1999 beyond the territory of the alliance to include so-called out-of-area missions, etc.

The war in Ukraine offered the United States an opportunity to further tighten the reins on Germany (and the Europeans following the German lead) and to rule out Schröder- and Merkel-style insubordination for the foreseeable future, if not forever. Since 2014, at the latest, NATO had been working under U.S. leadership to transform Ukraine’s military so as to achieve interoperability between NATO and Ukrainian forces; in 2020, Ukraine officially became an associate member of NATO’s Multilateral Interoperability Program.¹⁶ What weapons in par­ticular Germany was to supply to Ukraine—whose military had been upgraded by the United States faster than any other country’s in the years leading up to 2021¹⁷—and for what purpose, was determined not by the (initially reluctant) German government, but by the United States. The fact that the gradual transition to so-called heavy weapons, which took place in the course of 2022, was conspicuously not the idea of the SPD, the party of Chancellor Scholz, demonstrated that the United States, working with the Greens and the FDP, was calling the shots in German defense policy. The SPD, in particular, had long been suspected of a lingering postwar pacifism. And as the Ukraine war con­tinued, party leaders found themselves under apparently irresistible pressure to undertake an unending series of public confessions of mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, to make forgotten their collaboration with Merkel’s silent sabotage of the 2 percent of GDP defense spending target and of the extension of NATO to Ukraine.

(2) Germany and the United States. The American departure from “end of history” globalism came as a surprise to Germany, which in its wishful thinking had, for much longer than the United States itself, believed in the “rule-based” elimination of nation-state interests and power politics. For some time, Russia and China had been uncomfort­able with the status assigned to them by the United States after 1990. When in the following decade, after years of economic growth, they felt sufficiently well-endowed to pursue something like strategic political autonomy, the price of their subordination to U.S. hegemony became too high for them to bear. As for Germany, as a non-nuclear power, it was too small to claim a say at the global level. It also had been a major beneficiary of borderless markets under U.S. law and with U.S. money. German industry prospered by buying cheap inputs in China for expen­sive final products sold there, while buying from Russia a good part of the energy needed for their production. This had long attracted the displeasure of American mercantilists, which Germany was increasingly made to feel as U.S. industry declined and tensions with the two breakaways from the American New World Order, Russia and China, grew.

In addition, the United States had realized that, under the conditions of global economic and financial interdependence that had grown in the neoliberal era, economic sanctions could be an effective first use of force between states. This was true especially for a country of continental size like the United States, for which something like economic autarky is in many respects within the realm of possibility. If sanctions are to be effective, however, they require the participation of other states, which must be persuaded or forced to join. Critical to this is Germany, with its uniquely extensive and diverse foreign trade. Germany, though, neces­sarily expects to be harmed by the fracturing of the borderless economic world of neoliberalism into geopolitical alliances. While from the Amer­ican point of view, this would simply be collateral damage, and indeed with positive side-effects for the American balance of trade, seen from Germany it could amount to nothing less than the end of its business model. In this respect, the Ukraine war introduces acute economic strains between the United States and Germany, and possibly puts an end to the German mode of production and prosperity, forced by political disruption of global supply chains, energy sources, and export markets.¹⁸

For a few years during Trump’s presidency, it had looked as though the United States would leave Europe to itself in the slipstream of world history. To some in Germany, “America first” read as a slogan for an American isolationism that would allow their country to continue to ride the gravy train of American capitalism for free, Merkel-style, at the price of occasional pro-American lip service. Even under Trump, how­ever, there was no real reason for such hopes. To be sure, Trump at­tempted an end of hostilities with Russia and, to the horror of his country’s military-political complex, refused to understand why NATO was still needed after the end of the Soviet Union, let alone why Ukraine had to be a NATO member. But this obviously did not affect the long-term strategic planning in the depths of the U.S. national security apparatus, with Ukraine as the linchpin of a policy of complete NATO-ization of Europe west of the Russian border. On the contrary, Ameri­can Democrats succeeded in poisoning Trump’s “détente” with Russia with the claim that he owed his 2016 election victory over Hillary Clinton to Russian interference in the campaign (a “stolen election” narrative that preceded the one Trump spread four years later).

In any case, apart from Russia, Trump had his own axe to grind with Germany, which he repeatedly accused of not fulfilling its 2 percent obligation and free riding on the United States. Nord Stream 2 also played a role early on, insofar as the U.S. Senate, but also the White House under Trump and then Biden, continued to demand that the pipeline not be put into operation. In this they were supported in Germany by the Green carbon and nuclear opponents and by the friends of America and Ukraine in the CDU.¹⁹ Here, too, political-imperial and private-economic American interests were indistinguish­able. The fact that the invention of fracking and its widespread application toward the end of Obama’s presidency made the United States self-sufficient in energy, and potentially even an energy exporter, may have played a role in the background.²⁰

Contrary to what Merkel may have hoped, the Biden administration did not forgo exploiting the strategic opportunities that arose here. For Biden, the states of Europe, especially Germany, are allies to be stra­tegically reactivated and kept on a short leash. They, in particular, have to understand that the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021 was not a Trump-like farewell to world politics but rather a global front-straightening in the service of an overwhelmingly more important goal, to be pursued jointly but all the more resolutely: the restoration of U.S. power before it is too late.

In the informal negotiations between Russia and the United States over Ukraine that followed in the fall of that year, Germany and the European Union played no role whatsoever; Biden and his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, held their cards close to their well-armored chests. Shortly before—and even more so after—the outbreak of war, this was followed by demands for unconditional German and European allegiance to the “Western” war aims as determined by the United States and Ukraine, and no one else. Next was a long line of ever-new symbolic humiliations of Germany by both countries, in a highly visible way by the Ukrainian ambassador to Germany, who spouted insults of leading German politicians via Twitter. The response was a stream of German self-flagellation for having been “wrong about Putin” and failing, at the latest after the Russian occupation of Crimea, to prepare the Bundeswehr for the liberation of Ukraine from Russia. To make amends, the chancellor announced on the third day of the war, in a dramatic Sunday morning address to the Bundestag, a debt-financed special fund, outside of the federal budget, of €100 billion to “upgrade” the Bundeswehr—a boost in defense spending that, however, will take time to make itself felt on the battlefield, very likely more time than the Ukrainian war. Indeed, its practical implementation very soon stalled, much to the chagrin of the arms lobbyists.²¹

The United States also did its part to publicly announce the restoration of alliance discipline. In early February 2022, three weeks before the beginning of the war, Biden let it be known, in a now famous joint press conference with Scholz in Washington, that the United States knew how to deal with Nord Stream 2: “If Russia invades, then there will be no longer Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it. . . . I promise you we will be able to do it.” Weeks later, the U.S. Secretary of Defense invited a posse of some forty Ukraine-supporting countries, not to Washington or to NATO headquarters in Brussels, but to Ramstein, the giant Amer­ican air base in Rhineland-Palatinate, to organize under his chairmanship and in front of the American flag the arming of Ukraine; several more such meetings followed. A few months later came the explosion of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines in the Baltic Sea. The blast—which would not have been possible without considerable military means and about whose perpetrators the German government claims both not to know and not to be allowed to say anything²² —ensured that gas sup­plies from Russia to Germany and western Europe have to pass through Ukraine for the foreseeable future. This will allow the Ukrainian gov­ernment, and indeed the United States, to interrupt any future flow of gas any time. As a result, Germany, which has switched off its nuclear power plants, has to secure for itself a reliable long-term supply of liquefied natural gas, which the United States is of course happy to provide.

(3) Germany and France. The redefinition of the boundaries of German sovereignty by the United States put an end to the old French project of turning a politically and militarily semi-sovereign Germany into the economic engine room of a French-defined European sovereignty. The question of whether what was left of Germany after 1945 should be primarily a transatlantic dependency of the United States or a junior partner of an independent French world power had been the subject of disputes in West Germany from early on, between two con­flicting foreign policy schools of thought, “Atlanticists” and “Gaullists.” The outcome, however, was never really in doubt: only the United States and, under its command, NATO could offer Germany something like a reasonably reliable nuclear umbrella. France was nevertheless needed for German foreign policy, especially in the EU as a partner (senior, according to French belief and German diplomatic protocol, and junior increasingly in reality) of a “tandem” that was to advance the “European project” and thus serve fundamental West German postwar interests in regional political and economic inclusion. In the Merkel era, the Franco-German relationship then became the scene of a kind of seesaw politics by which Merkel could opportunistically signal to the United States, on one occasion, and to France, on another, that, unfortunately, their wishes could not be fully satisfied out of consideration for the other partner.

In truth, of course, the relationship was always less than symmetrical, and increasingly so. While France was pacified with ever-new declarations of friendship such as the Treaty of Aachen, the United States used its German military bases at will for its expeditions in the Middle East, drawing on rights dating back to the unconditional surrender and the occupation of 1945. Also standing in the way of French hopes for a privileged dual-hegemonic relationship with Germany was the fact that France was and is not willing to “Europeanize,” i.e., share with Ger­many, both its nuclear weapons and its permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council (post-Brexit France having become the only EU member state with nuclear arms and permanent Security Council membership). As a consequence, France really has nothing to offer that might persuade Germany to break away from American tutelage. This leaves the French with no more than consolation prizes, as German diplomacy develops a certain routine of thinking up ever-new symbolic gifts to appease its tandem partner while Macron’s grand speeches on a Franco-German “refoundation” of Europe are being received with polite silence.

The war in Ukraine and the return of the U.S. hegemon to western Europe have more than ever transatlanticized German foreign policy and put an end to Merkel-style games of confusion. One result is that Macron finds himself forced, if he wants to avoid being left behind on the diplomatic battlefield, to forget his original demand that the West avoid defeating Russia and allow Putin to save face. As the war drags on, Macron’s public positions have turned increasingly Atlanticist, punctuated by occasional outbreaks of discontent, such as his earlier diagnosis of NATO as “brain-dead.” Given the renewed Babylonian captivity of German foreign policy in Washington, France’s European policy aimed at Franco-European “strategic sovereignty” will have to be re­formulated one way or another. Berlin, in order to mitigate the disappointment, after years of foot-dragging, in November 2022 quickly opened the way for German participation in the controversial French-German-Spanish FCAS fighter aircraft project, easily the most expensive weap­ons system in human history, which is being pushed by France and its aircraft manufacturer Dassault in alliance with Airbus.²³

(4) Germany and the European Union.²⁴ The disciplining of Ger­many by the United States within the framework of NATO and the accompanying strategic weakening of France are effecting deep changes in the politics of the European Union. German leadership, played down under Merkel, is now openly claimed as part of Scholz’s Zeitenwende,²⁵ even though—or perhaps because—under the new conditions it can only be exercised with American authority. The EU of the future will for a long time be shaped by the tasks assigned to it by the United States and NATO in the Ukraine war. These include the design and implementation of a sanctions regime against Russia and, increasingly, China, together with internal rationing in response to supply-chain disruptions, whether caused by the EU itself, by the United States, or by an enemy, whomever that may be. Furthermore, there are likely to be changes in the EU’s admission policy, particularly for eastern Europe, long de­manded by the United States and just as long opposed by France, not least to offload the costs of the postwar reconstruction of Ukraine onto Europe, predominantly Germany. Even if Ukraine were refused admis­sion to the EU until the end of the war, having to be content with some sort of a timetable, the west Balkan states cannot be denied membership for long. This would require that the strictly rule-bound accession process be radically simplified and even more politicized than it already is. To avoid this, France is promoting a second-class membership status for countries wanting to join but needing to be socialized in the ways of the EU. Germany, at the same time, is proposing to make the admission of new members conditional on the introduction of majority rule for the European Council in foreign policy, apparently in order to be able, together with France, to deny countries like Poland and, later, Ukraine a veto on foreign policy matters.

Still, there will be a clear shift of the EU’s center of gravity to the east, especially in favor of the American favorites, Poland and the Baltics, and not only as a result of the coming wave of admissions. After the war, the EU will be strictly demarcated from Russia, by both con­tinuing economic sanctions and the coordinated rearmament of EU member states on Russia’s western border under NATO guidance and supervision. Within the EU, Poland, the Baltic states, and Ukraine in particular will be careful to ensure that whatever tendencies there may be in Germany toward a new Ostpolitik will not call into question the EU’s geostrategic ties to the West. As far as the future character of the Union is concerned, in the eyes of its newly powerful eastern member states, it will primarily be an alliance of convenience for the economic and, under the leadership of NATO, military support of the countries bordering Russia. For them, the EU is decidedly not a vehicle for the supranational dismantling of national statehood or for the replacement of national currencies by the euro. Nor is it seen by them as an institution for political education to spread liberal democracy and a libertarian way of life in culturally backward eastern societies. In this context, the European Commission is likely to find ways to settle, in the not-too-distant future, the legal proceedings initiated primarily under German-Green pressure that aim to cut EU financial support to countries such as Poland, as punishment for violations of Western-defined democratic principles, European “values,” or the rule of law—provided that, unlike Hungary, they remain aligned with the foreign and national security policies of NATO and the European Commission.

Germany in particular will be faced with the problem of preserving the European Monetary Union. To a much greater extent than before, it will have to provide material support to Ukraine and the Union’s eastern frontline states; it also will have to increase its defense budget to more than 2 percent of its national product at the behest of NATO and the United States; and it must somehow compensate its own population for the losses in prosperity suffered as a result of the coming retrenchment of global trade. So far, a country like Italy has been kept loyal to “the European project” by—probably illusory—prospects of economic improvement in some not-too-distant future, through European side-payments under programs such as the NGEU Corona Recovery Fund. This, however, may become more difficult if the electorate in Germany—and other northwestern European countries—begins to feel over­taxed by the combined weight of their European obligations. It would then be predominantly up to Germany, in its newly assumed leadership role, to take on the steeply rising costs of holding the European Union state system together, by fiscal or monetary means, using either the EU budget or the ECB’s bag of tricks, or both. Whether it will have the capacity to do so, given the impending crisis of its production model, seems doubtful.

(5) Germany, the United States, and China. Much will depend on how China acts in the Russian-American conflict over Ukraine and what this means for the looming American-Chinese conflict. Trump had already seen China as America’s real adversary and was anxious to prepare the United States for a military confrontation with the rising Asian superpower. Biden’s line differs from Trump’s and that of the Republicans aligned with him only in that it considers European assis­tance in the upcoming global conflict as desirable. The Ukraine war serves in this respect as an opportunity to bring the western Europeans up to speed as a geopolitical auxiliary of the United States. For this, Germany would have to give up the production facilities, supply chains, and sales markets in China that it has built over decades, and instead rely on trade and economic relations with the United States—a country that is increasingly as able and willing as China to exert economic pressure for political goals.

The political dynamics unfolding between the United States, China, and Germany in the context of the Ukrainian war appear of fundamental importance for the future of the global political economy as well as for the interaction between the three contemporary “varieties of capitalism”—liberal-democratic, communist-nationalist, and authoritarian-oligarchic. At the level of interstate relations, China seems to be offering face-saving assistance to the United States should it develop an interest in freezing or settling (rather than victoriously ending) the conflict in Ukraine. Repeated statements by the Chinese head of state to the effect that China would not approve the use of nuclear weapons, no matter by whom, point in this direction, as does China’s policy of not providing arms to countries at war, including Russia. It cannot be ruled out that in return for China sticking to this position the United States promised, one way or another, not to equip Ukraine with weapons so superior to Russia’s that, limited to conventional means, Russia would have to fight the Ukrainian army on Russian soil or even face being defeated; in that case, recourse to tactical nuclear arms would be inevitable.

Germany must have an interest, and not only an economic one, in a cooling off of the conflict between the United States and China. Scholz’s relief after a brief visit to Beijing, at the end of which President Xi once again publicly condemned the use of nuclear weapons,²⁶ points in this direction. China, and likely nobody else, would have the means to re­strain Russia. Its foreign policy being as unideological as it is oriented toward the long term, a discreet agreement between China and the United States is conceivable to help the United States extricate itself from Ukraine, should it ever feel the need to do so. In return, the United States could refrain from imposing further export controls and other economic restrictions on China. This would pave the way for a continuation, presumably more selective than in the past, of German-Chinese economic relations.

A war with the United States would come early for China, probably too early; that is precisely why there are factions in the United States that want such a war now. Among those in U.S. politics and in the American deep state who would like to attack China sooner rather than later, the lesson of Thucydides from the Peloponnesian War appears to resonate, according to which a sitting hegemon facing a rising rival should strike first as long as it can still win a war with some degree of certainty.²⁷ (Wars, of course, are always unpredictable, and on Clausewitz’s foggy battlefields, like in court and on the high seas, one is in God’s hands.) Athens struck too late against Sparta, and for that it was punished by history. The situation may incidentally have been similar for Putin, who seems to have missed the moment when he could have defeated Ukraine by taking its capital, before the United States had upgraded the Ukrainian military. A Western stereotype has it that China has longer time horizons than the historically younger European world; thus, Xi’s motto today might be the same as that of his great predecessor Deng Xiaoping: “Keep a cool head and maintain a low profile. Never take the lead—but aim to do something big.” If, in view of the shambles they left behind in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, and, perhaps soon, Ukraine, the Americans were to go for a settlement with China after all, and if China wanted to buy time to grow unassailable, Germany and Europe might gain a breathing space.

Or they might not. The war in Ukraine may continue for some time, more or less frozen along present fronts, allowing no space for the rise of another postwar pacifism, certainly not in Germany. In order to avoid being pushed around by its allies indefinitely, as in the early months of the war, Germany has, after long hesitation, declared itself ready for a leading role in Europe, within a mandate from the United States and NATO to keep the European anti-Russian alliance together in the name of a united West. In return, it hopes to be allowed to con­tinue profitable economic relations with China, as long as this does not stand in the way of American policy in the Pacific, the future course of which seems difficult to predict. Concerning the European Union, Ger­many’s assumption of leadership is welcomed by the United States, which is traditionally even more suspicious of French than of German political intentions. At the same time, however, the EU’s power center is shifting east, to Poland and the Baltics, with the support of the United States and, not to forget, the United Kingdom. This effectively subordinates the EU to NATO, turning it into NATO’s instrument of econom­ic warfare and of mobilizing military and economic support for Ameri­ca’s anti-Russian clientele in eastern Europe.

No New Postwar

The war has torn apart the intricate web of Merkel’s non-decisions and non-committal commitments, leaving the German state defenseless against the geopolitical typhoon that is marking the end of the New World Order. The ongoing reorganization of the world economy under the primacy of geopolitics—the decomposition of the economic inter­dependencies of the heydays of globalism and their conversion into weapons of international economic warfare—has made it impossible for Germany to continue to cultivate and exploit for its own benefit its national business model. Germany was not prepared for a Zeitenwende. “Europe,” as organized in the EU, is increasingly being used by the political classes of its member states as a garbage can for problems that they find too hot to address; it is not an answer or an alternative to American hegemony. Realistic ideas for an independent European state system, as a third pole in a newly multipolar world, one that could shield the continent from the unpredictability of American politics and policy, have not really come forward, even during Trump’s term in office.

Germany’s future lies somewhere in the highly charged magnetic field between the United States and China—where the fate of Russia, fallen from grace as a world power, will also be decided. Unlike countries such as India or Brazil, Germany is defined by its geostrategic location on the eastern front of a U.S.-dominated transatlantic state system. For this reason, it will find it difficult to identify a position amid American-Chinese bipolarity where it could establish, alone or within a bloc of European states, something like equidistance between the two big-power centers of an emerging new world order.²⁸ Apparently, the Social Democratic majority of the present German government hopes to ingratiate their country with the United States by helping it contain its proxy war with Russia and avoid a Third World War, keeping Russia at bay without either defeating or making peace with it. (If, ultimately, the United States will honor such help is a different matter.) In return, it is hoped that Germany will be allowed to maintain its economic relations with China in part, as long as they are deemed compatible with U.S. strategic needs in its confrontation with China. This does not look like much space for maneuver, and wouldn’t be even for a virtuoso of political ambivalence like Angela Merkel.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume VII, Number 3 (Fall 2023): 79–99.

Notes